Saturday, May 16, 2009

Last week I decided to surprise my husband with these stuffed bell peppers.I found a pack of six for five bucks at costco that came with two of each color but green. Now normally I can't stand bell peppers myself, but I knew my husband loved them. He had a pretty bad day at work and needed some cheering up.

The recipe like many of mine I just developed myself as I went along. The results were fantastic, although I have to say we all agreed that the orange peppers tasted best with the filling.

Instructions1. chop up the onion, and garlic finely. Also take the inside seeds out of the jalapeno and chop up finely. Put all these into a pan with ground beef on medium heat to brown. I also added some salt and pepper.

2. Cut off the top of the bell peppers. Use a spoon to scoop out all the insides. Place them in a glass pan. Sprinkle a good portion of cheddar cheese into the bottoms of each pepper.

3. When beef and vegi's are browned add the 1 cup of rice and 1/2 cup of water to the pan and cover with lid.

4. Pour the contents of the tomato sauce cans into a bowl. add 1 1/2 tablespoons oregano and 1 tsp of basil to the tomato sauce. Mix well and then add to the rice ground beef mixture. Make sure to stir often mixing the ingredients so they don't stick to the bottom of the pan.

5. Once the rice mixture is cooked and the rice is the right texture take off the heat and sprinkle lots of cheddar cheese onto the filling and then mix it in.

6. Set the oven to preheat to 350 degrees. Fill each pepper to the top with the filling. Once all the peppers are full put more cheese on top and if you like put the little tops back on. Add another cup of water into the pan with the peppers. Place in the oven and bake for 45- 50 minutes.

These are a major hit, and especially tasted good with orange bell peppers.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Since my husbands favorite vegetable is pumpkin. I made the attempt to come up with a creamy pumpkin soup recipe for him.My mother caught it on video, so don't mind how awful i look or my voice, just stare at the pumpkin soup. It really was tasty, and there was no leftovers by the end of the night!

and here is the video of the final product. I always add toasted pumpkin seeds because they add a nice salty mild crunch to the soup.

Lately I haven't been posting as much. This is do largely to me being in a more crafting and sewing mood then baking. So you might see a mix of posts.

My first experiment was in making fleece hats. I found that fleece has this wonderful affect of hypnotizing whoever is near it to touch it. It's so soft and fluffy and warm people just can't resist. Yes not even I made my will save vs the fleece.

The first experiment was this cute flop eared bunny hat which is for a young cousin of mine.

I used white buttons for eyes and sewed on a scrap of black for the nose using a zig zag stitch around it. The mouth is dotted on with permanent black marker and then gone over with zig zab stitches in black to darken it a little. Also this hat has little ear flaps to keep her ears toasty warm on cold days. I hope she gives the bunny hat a cute name!

While working on the bunny hat my younger sis made herself an awesome Dino hat with spikes. I designed it but she did all the cutting and sewing herself! It looked so cute on her she didn't take it off almost the entire time she visited. She even wore it to the zoo where many young boys were very jealous.

Then we combined our powers of "awesome" to create this hat four our mom. I designed it and sewed the basic hat, the side roughs and the eye. She cut out the pieces and sewed the ears and the white rim. The eye is colored with permanent markers in various colors on white fleece. I zig zagged black around the white eye to put it on the hat and darkened the ring with black marker.

With these plethora of cute hats coming about the hubby wanted one of his own in his Goth style.So I made this warm and much larger black goth hat for him. The patch is a leather patch with embroidered skull design on it that I found at walmart in their craft section. He wears it to work now when it's cold since he has an outside job, and it keeps his head and ears very warm he tells me.

So these happened at Christmas, but they were on my little sisters camera, and she finely sent them to me. My husbands favorite things in the world besides cheese is Cheesecake, and pumpkin anything.So for Christmas my sister and I made him a homemade pumpkin cheesecake.

We even whipped fresh whipped cream to top it. This was her first time piping and she did a fantastic job!

Also to celebrate the holidays we decided cookies were in order.Something chocolaty and fun. These are called fudgie wudgeys but my husband says they are chocolate orgasm cookies.

They are baked as little balls of chocolate fun and then rolled in powdered sugar when they come out of the oven. The recipe was from a set of cookbooks my stepmom got me called "With Heart & Soul" and "Heart & Soul: among friends"by Roxie Kelley and friends. These books are fantastic! They have the most darling illustrations in them and the recipes are phenomenal. So far we have tried four recipes from each book and every single one has gotten tasty results.